Thursday, May 08, 2014

Judith Collins: off the estate

John Key is being entangled in Judith Collins' evasionary strategy over her crony Oravida engagements during her trip to China last year whilst on government business as Justice Minister. Collins herself is already hopelessly bogged down in a swamp of her own making - the PM walks alongside on the firmer ground of deniability, holding her hand but ready to detach if it looks like he will get dragged down with her. We are at about that point now.

Banning her from Twitter (to limit her ability to respond) and forcing the self-proclaimed hard-hitter into taking stress leave (to humiliate her by undermining her tough image) is the sort of thing that happens before a total detachment. Collins has gone completely off the estate and she should not be surprised to find on her return that Key has locked the gate on her.

Rob Salmond at the Polity Blog has constructed a damning timeline and his latest post points out Key has contradicted the documents released by MFAT in order to keep to Collins' wobbly, moveable version of events. The documents reveal that MFAT diplomats were very, very concerned with that dinner involving a senior border official and after a lengthy 'SENSITIVE' correspondence - in which Collins requests that the NZ Ambassador to China and his wife attend - it was 'squared away' as a 'private dinner'. This seems to be rather scant camouflage and an uneasy fix as the officials remain deeply concerned, anxious and unsettled.

Collins answered a question in the House on this (as I recall) by claiming: of course it was a private dinner or why did I invite the Ambassador and his wife to it? This of course underlines it had official intent rather than the other way around - but logic was never Collins' strong suit. I take it that her chums Shi and Xu of Oravida were the ones demanding the NZ Ambassador's attendance to lend weight to their negotiations with the border official. The to and fro of agitation over the dinner and the subsequent post-dinner briefing by Collins to the Ambassador (in which she assures him that nothing untoward occurred) means it was being treated as an official engagement of some type.

What the PM needs - given he has lowered standards by accepting so much of her bullshit up till now without consequence - is another, fresh lie of hers to emerge on which he can demand a resignation. There are probably many lurking beneath the redactions in the email trail.

The PM responded to a question yesterday by saying that Oravida "is a genuine New Zealand company". How would he know? The shareholding is disguised behind a wormhole of lawyers trusts, the directors with the exception of Judith Collins' husband are Chinese nationals (who live most of their time in China as I understand) and they do not produce anything as such, just export NZ products to China. If it could be described as any sort of NZ company it would be a phoney one, a front one.

Ask yourself if the situation was reversed... and the Chinese Premier stands in the Great Hall of the People when defending a colleague of corruption and NZ influence, and he goes on in his claims to say that a company is 'a genuine Chinese company' when he knows that it is owned by NZers who cannot speak a Chinese language and who live most of the time in NZ and who only hold a Chinese passport because they paid political donations, and that the purpose of the company is to operate in NZ as a distributor and the only interaction with China is to source cheap products. No leader of China would ever say that of course, it would be political suicide; but a NZ PM steeped in cringing colonial subservience does exactly that. So pitiful, so weak. The only national interests being served here is that of the People's Republic of China. John Key has done nothing to refute the overwhelming impression that the Nats are in the pockets of the Chinese and that the rest of NZ under their leadership will soon follow.

Some notes I made from yesterday after going through the MFAT documents:

Shanghai Schedule 23/10/2013 'Business and Law Rountable' engagement at 5:15 but no depart time. 6:15 return to Hotel, 7:00 depart hotel for airport. Therefore Rountable is less than one hour and fucking around at hotel is pointless. What are details of this 'Roundtable'? Who? Where? What sponsoring organisation? Seems odd - who scheduled this? Was this put on just so it could be bumped for Oravida visit?

02/10/2013 email "Invite outgoing [redacted] to the dinner in Beijing" p.50/54. Outgoing who!? Who was outgoing at that time, Oct 2013?

08/10/2013 email invite to Shi and Xu to attend event.

09/10/2013 email of itinerary with Roudtable listed.

10/10/2013 email: Oravida visit request to 'be built into her programme'.